I'm bloody amazed by this one. I know I shouldn't be surprised by anything the Catholic clergy gets up to, but this is the nice, kind, friendly man who performed my own Confirmation when I was a child. And he's mates with my dad!

Given Keith Patrick's staunch anti-gay stance on pretty much everything, if this proves to be true then the level of hypocrisy involved is absolutely astounding.

Given Keith Patrick's staunch anti-gay stance on pretty much everything, if this proves to be true then the level of hypocrisy involved is absolutely astounding.

And yet, completely unsurprising. Hypocrisy has long been a feature of certain aspects of the Church.

I was raised Catholic but certainly have a lot of issues with what the faith preaches, including what it chooses to assert as law from the Bible and what it chooses to ignore.

You have to admit, though, that the forced resignation of its vehemently anti-gay leading British Cardinal over accusations of homosexual advances towards his own priests is pretty special, even for them. As the BBC pointed out, most controversies involving Cardinals has them attempting to cover up others' misdemeanours rather than perpetuating their own.

That said, I personally find ignoring and obscuring the sexual abuse of children more abhorrent than one grown man making sexual advances towards another grown man presumably able to refuse/defend himself, but I suppose that's just another discrepancy between my own standards of acceptability and that of my mother church.

I'd be lying if I said it doesn't frustrate me. My family is Catholic, my parents are devoutly Catholic and I myself am assailed by the odd bout of Catholic guilt (man they really grind that shit into you). I don't want to be ashamed and embarrassed of my family religion and the faith I was brought up in, I had enough of that crap as a Catholic kid in a largely Protestant school. But if you take fundamentalism out of the equation, no other leading religion has such a shady reputation: for systematic hypocrisy, corruption and indecency of the worst kind. They don't tackle it, they just ignore it, which is really not far removed from endorsing it.

And now they have a rare opportunity to actually make positive change - to install a Pope who is more progressive - but we all know they won't; they'll opt for another crusty old bigot and continue to sweep scandal after scandal under their plush Vatican carpets.

I'd be lying if I said it doesn't frustrate me. My family is Catholic, my parents are devoutly Catholic and I myself am assailed by the odd bout of Catholic guilt (man they really grind that shit into you). I don't want to be ashamed and embarrassed of my family religion and the faith I was brought up in, I had enough of that crap as a Catholic kid in a largely Protestant school. But if you take fundamentalism out of the equation, no other leading religion has such a shady reputation: for systematic hypocrisy, corruption and indecency of the worst kind. They don't tackle it, they just ignore it, which is really not far removed from endorsing it.

And now they have a rare opportunity to actually make positive change - to install a Pope who is more progressive - but we all know they won't; they'll opt for another crusty old bigot and continue to sweep scandal after scandal under their plush Vatican carpets.

We can only hope. It would seem like the perfect opportunity to really clean house and go forward. Can't see it happening to many crustys in charge I think plus I find strangely more recently that's there is a younger group of catholics coming through that want to go back to a pre Vatican II approach. We shall see I guess at the moment its all so depressingly familiar.

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Just to spare peoples blushes I feel it's only right that I should point out I'm a girl people! Not in a Crying Game way in the born without a willy way. I hope that's cleared that up.

Real bad own goal there. A chap was on BBC new calling himself a catholic journalist (but t'internet suggests he's a press spokesman for the Archdiocese of Birmingham) who essentially said the priests should make themselves known so people can decide if they want to be served by them/take communion.